by Faith Hunter
“But the MS Angels know about the SunStar. Maybe from the line you ran down?”
“Possible, Darlin’, but not likely,” she said, her Southern accent back strong. “As to your other question, that might present a theory. The second in command of the SunStar was Captain Evelyn Raymond. While my records don’t indicate that anyone except the CO was aboard the SunStar when I went down, they also don’t indicate that Captain Raymond ever placed herself in her escape pod.”
“She was on board the ship when it went down,” I said.
“Speculation. But possible.”
“She’s the Evelyn they were talking about. And she somehow ended up riding with the Angels.”
“Or she’s their prisoner. My records indicate that Captain Raymond would never violate her oath of service, which would include disclosing the presence or location of the SunStar. Never.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But prolonged drugs and torture might have changed that. You’ve been here for years. So, now, we have to rescue Mateo, question some of the MS Angels, kill them all, maybe kill Jagger, and figure out how to rescue Captain Raymond, who is MIA.”
A second jolt of artificial energy shot through me from the SunStar’s med-bay.
“Piece of cake,” I finished.
“Your suit’s reading hunger, Darlin’. My stores can provide sustenance, though the crew made it clear that the cake was not up to human standards.”
Piece of cake. Right. I chuckled. “Okay.”
I pulled myself up and forward, dragging my feet through the broken tiles, heading back to the access hatch. Cats followed in my wake and raced ahead, exploring.
“I’ll eat. Then we go rescue Mateo and kill off some Puffers. Oh.” I stopped. “What did the Crawler do while it was inside you?”
“There have been no reports of hostile incursion, Sweet Thang.”
“Take a look at the vid Mateo found. It’s in Gomez’s files.”
Jolene said something very unladylike and stopped talking to me. I found my way to a weapons locker, weaponed up, and then found something that looked like a food storage and prep device—if such a thing were the size of a small car—and ordered lunch. With cake. The reconstituted soup wasn’t bad, but Jolene’s crew was right.
The cake sucked.
* * *
With the exception of the office lights, which were off tonight, there was never artificial illumination in the junkyard to pollute the sky. Tonight, the moon was below the horizon, the night sky was as black as the far reaches of space, and the stars were a glowing blanket so rich and deep and intense it took my breath away. I tracked the warbot suit and found Mateo, the three-legged, three-armed warbot, on the ground in a tangle of limbs. The cats were sitting on his chest carapace, staring at the single shuddering leg.
Jolene had isolated the Puffers in one leg and kept them there.
I tried to communicate with Mateo via EntNu and radio, but he didn’t answer, so I leaned over the meter-wide helmet section and tapped on the silk-plaz screen. My “shave and a haircut” tapping was answered from the torso cavity with the requisite “two bits,” and Mateo’s comms went live, working now that we were suit to suit.
“How many Puffers are left in-field?” he asked.
“Jolene and the cats are still tracking them,” I said. Mateo’s silence went tight with tension. “Yeah. I met Jolene, Captain. We had a nice conversation.”
“I was protecting my ship.”
Mateo’s voice cut like a whip. This wasn’t the easy-going, brain-damaged employee I knew, but likely the real Mateo, the one who had evolved back to himself thanks to the Berger-chip plug-ins I had purchased for him. The Mateo I was meeting for the first time. The Mateo who was technically my thrall, thanks to the transition he underwent when I had to pull him out of his warbot suit early on in our relationship. I had to wonder how long he’d been faking the brain damage. I had to wonder if he’d somehow managed to wean himself off Devil Milk addiction.
I had to wonder if I had just discovered a way around the worst parts of the transition—Berger-chips. The annoying little chatterboxes provided additional memory and sped up the brain’s ability to make connections, which the brain lost during nanobot transition. Had they helped restore Mateo’s independence?
“I’m not arguing,” I said peaceably. “You have your duty and your oaths. We have”—I checked my Hand-Held—“seventeen minutes and change before the MS Angels attack again. I believe they have Evelyn Raymond, your second in command, somewhere, and she gave up the location of the ship.”
“She would nev—” He stopped as the implications sank in. Evelyn, a prisoner. Abused. For who knew how many years.
“We have two healthy rescuers and one injured invader, exfiltrating from the back of the property, where they ascertained the ship was in the mine crack. They are not aware of the rest of the ship on the surface under the ghillie tech. They’re moving slow and, in their current position, are unable to communicate with their compatriots at the front because of WIMP leakage. I want to interrogate one. If I succeed in taking care of the Puffers, can you make the invaders talk?”
“We’ve never tested your altered blood chemistries on Puffers. You can’t—”
“It’s too late for hiding what I am. I—”
The vision of Clarisse intruded, the way she moved, so different from humans.
So much like me.
The way the others wanted to touch her constantly.
The way One-Eyed Jack let her be in charge.
I looked out over the junkyard. Dread, like a torrent of ice water engulfed me.
“Jolene,” I whispered. “Are there any records of Clarisse Warhammer, or any of her aliases, surviving an attack by modified Cataglyphis bicolor fabricius ants?”
Like I had . . .
“Shining, you don’t think—?” Mateo stopped as he accessed his own memory and intel plug-ins.
I removed my left ballistic armor cuisse—a blood-soaked thigh-piece—and rolled it into a column. I stuck the cuisse into the torn space on the ankle of Mateo’s warbot suit.
“Come and get me, you little buggers.”
“There are three recorded cases of humans surviving a swarm of Cataglyphis bicolor fabricius ants,” Jolene said, sounding less snippy. “Sherman Griffith. Shining Smith. Catherine Warren, AKA Clarisse Warhammer.”
That’s what I was afraid of.
“Oh. Honey,” Jolene said gently. “You was swarmed. That hadda hurt something awful. For a long, long time.”
I blinked against unanticipated tears. No one had shown me kindness about the ants before. Pops, his body jerking and shaking with the Parkinson’s, had just sat at the end of my bed, as he would have for any fallen OMW, and watched me suffer. He’d sat there for three days while I screamed and the fever raged. When I survived, against all odds, he’d patted my foot, the covers between his hand and me, and said, “Good work. I’m proud of you,” and left my hospital cubicle.
I hadn’t started secreting nanos right away.
I had gone back into the battlefield a week later, because we were up against a wall and I was small and wiry and our enemies never even noticed me because I was a scrawny twelve-year-old child and was no apparent threat. For all those reasons, the OMW and my own father had let me go and fight. Pops had let me crawl into a Mama-Bot to try and disable it. I’d been cut in a battle with Puffers. Only much later had I begun to secrete the mutated bio-mech-nanos. Bloody hell.
No one had known back then what surviving a bicolor attack might mean. I figured that no one knew today, except for three of us. And with my mutated nanos, I was probably a singularity, the only one who could do what I was trying.
Tears dried fast in the desert air. I waggled the bloody cuisse, tapping it against Mateo’s suit to spread the blood-scent. The Puffers in the warbot suit fell still for a dozen heartbeats as their micro sensors addressed the presence of blood and my own half-mech, half-bio, mutated nanos. The Puffers attacked at full speed,
about twenty centimeters a minute. I led them out of the suit and gave them the cuisse to suck on. Their nanobots would harvest my blood protein and if Mateo’s and my speculations were right, I’d be able to control the Puffers. And the cats, especially Tuffs and her three best friends now that they had all drunk my blood on the spaceship. And Jagger? Maybe. And possibly Jolene, from the one time I entered her, and more so now that I’d bled inside her command sleeve. And maybe I’d someday be able to control the office and Gomez too.
Just like Clarisse controlled the team with her. That was what I’d seen in the upside-down eyes of my cat spy in the Mammoth. The way she moved. Everyone touching her. The way they hung on her every word. She had claimed them, enthralled them, and unlike the way I felt about thralls serving me, Clarisse had made them slaves.
I held out a hand to the Puffers and pulled at them through my blood.
The Puffers came to me, slowed and stopped a hand’s breadth away. I had seen the Puffers talking to each other. So had Jolene. That meant that these mini-bots had adaptive AIs. There was a chance that, by now, they might have comms and even be able to understand English, which would be very, very bad. Unless I could control them.
I pushed with my blood, envisioning what I wanted, saying, “Stasis function mode.”
The Puffers went still. Bugger. It worked. I figured that even their nanobots were unmoving, at least for a time.
I replaced my thigh armor and leaned toward Tuffs until she came close enough to touch noses. I envisioned the location and the actions I wanted her to take, saying “If you can, herd all the bots to the Grabber. I’ll decommission them as soon as I can.” She tilted her head, her whiskers scraping my cheek, looking at me like I was crazy. I might be.
To Mateo, I said, “I need to tie off the worst of your suit damage.”
Delicate, his massive arm moving with balletic grace, Mateo handed me a plaz-tie, and I threaded it through the two sides of the under-armor on his damaged foot peg, pulling the ends tight. The repair was makeshift and wouldn’t keep out a determined Puffer, but it helped. And time was passing faster and faster; I deliberately didn’t look at my chrono.
“How much damage did they do inside you?” I asked him.
“Like rats,” he said. “They chewed some stuff up. Deposited a whole bunch of nanos—thousands more than when I escaped the ship. They’re starting to reproduce, prepping to take me apart; I have maybe seventy-two hours before they reach critical mass and start to build new Puffers. I can make do until this crisis is over and we can put my suit under the AG Grabber, just like last time.” Putting the entire suit under meant taking Mateo out of the warbot again. I said nothing about that, and Mateo handed me ties to secure the two Puffers.
“About the CO thing?” Mateo said.
“Later,” I said, attaching the Puffers to my belt and standing. “Like you said, after this crisis is over.”
Using all six limbs like a spider, Mateo pushed himself to his feet and stood upright on his three longest limbs, well over four times my height. Stepping gracefully over skids of old vehicle parts, he moved to the back of the property. I made my way to the Grabber and turned it off, letting down the two humans I had pulled into the anti-gravity field. They landed with dual thumps. I checked for pulses and discovered both were alive, but were little more than drooling bags of biology. If I stuck them under a scanner, I’d see their brain chemistries were seriously out of whack and brain activity was erratic.
I had killed them.
I studied them closely. I would remember their faces in my dreams. That was the least I could do.
Three Puffers chased by cats trundled down nearby aisles.
Things clanged softly from Mateo’s general location. Someone shouted, the sound muffled.
Tuffs wound around my legs in a supple, agile figure eight.
I pulled the human bodies out of the way and tossed the two Puffers under the Grabber, turning it back on and stepping quickly away from the energy release. The Puffers rose in the air as I walked to the front of the office, stepping over the Angels’ number three guy. He was in two parts and well chewed. I could have just walked on in, but I tapped on the office door. Jagger opened it. Heat whooshed out, into the cold desert night. I met Jagger’s eyes, too bright, feverish. There was a weapon pointed at my chest.
“Put that away,” I said softly.
Jagger started to obey and stopped. He was strong, fighting the changes in his body and the pull of my blood.
With two fingers, I pushed the weapon aside as I entered and held the door for all the cats that wanted to come in after me. Tuffs, Notch (still in his bandages), and four other named cats traipsed in. Behind them leaped maybe a half dozen cats I knew but had never named beyond Cat. They trotted in and started exploring, wandering everywhere, from the med-bay where two cats were in healing status, to the kitchen, to my bed, where three injured but healing cats already lounged. I’d never get the cat hair off the sheets. Fortunately, the cats’ nanobots killed fleas and ticks, or the office would be infested with them.
Desperately thirsty from the injury and blood loss, I went to the cooler and took out a bottle of water. Opened it. Drank it empty. Opened another and poured it into a bowl for the cats. They raced over and drank. Standing, I watched Jagger and waited. His color was high.
“What did you do to me?” Jagger asked.
And there it was.
“Nothing. I did nothing,” I half-lied. Because he was mine now and I had to try to transition his mind away from being enthralled, to remove memories I could no longer allow him to have. I put the empty bottles in the bin.
Jagger sat at the dinette and placed his weapon on the table. A good ten cats leaped on and around the OMW’s national enforcer, tails high. I checked my chrono. I wanted to give Jagger orders, but if I did and he resisted, this would go bad in a hurry.
“I hate cats,” he said, and he might have been speaking to me or to the juvenile cat in his lap, demanding attention with head butting. “They have fleas. They have no sense of loyalty. Damn things don’t even fetch.”
His hand stroked down the demanding cat’s back and curled around his tail in a long swooping swipe. Jagger looked up at me, milk-chocolate-brown eyes alternately angry and slightly befuddled as the dual nanos in my blood took over his body down to the genes. I wanted to say I was sorry. But my blood wasn’t sorry. My blood was programmed to take over the people I met, to create a nest for myself. Just like the genetically altered bicolor ants did.
I pushed aside three cats and sat across from him.
“We don’t have long to stop the invaders. And we need to stop them. I have defenses I shouldn’t have.”
“No shit. I saw the arrays. And the tech. And the fricking shields. It’s all top-of-the-line military from the end of the war. How’d you get it?”
“It was here when I came. And if the MS Angels get it, they’ll have tech and weapons no one but the military should have access to.”
He kept stroking the cat, silent. I watched him, noting his skin flushing deeper red, his breathing speeding up. His eyes were beginning to look hollowed. He was getting sick. Just like I had. Just like Tuffs had. And somewhat like the Puffers who had tasted my blood had.
“I’m keeping the weapons, ammo, and tech away from the PRC. Away from the Ruskies. And out of the hands of the bad guys.”
“And you’re better than the bad guysss?” His voice began to slur. “I don’t think so.”
“Tuffs,” I said.
The cat left the water bowl and leaped onto the table. She touched my nose.
“Get your spy cat out of the vehicle.” I envisioned that cat leaping from the window and pushed that vision at Tuffs. She tilted her head, breathed out, “Hhhhah,” and showed me her fangs. I hoped that meant yes.
“Gomez,” I said as my Hand-Held chimed a two-minute warning. “Shields. B/B Three arrays. The minute the cat is out of the Mammoth, disable all remaining biological forms. Do not damage the ve
hicles or the mini-tank. I want that scrap.”
“Disable?” Jagger asked.
I shrugged slightly. “Interesting weapons in the B/B Three array. It stops all biological functions.”
“B/B Three array? Wa’s at?”
I didn’t respond.
“Wait. B/B . . . Thasss Bug tech. No one hasss Bug tech,” Jagger said. His tongue wasn’t working properly. He blinked several times, confused. “No one hasss B/B Three Array,” he insisted. “Thasss Bug weapon.”
I wondered if the Bugs had shot down the SunStar. Or helped the PRC or the Ruskies shoot it down. It made sense if the Bug ship had followed the SunStar down and somehow ended up crashing too. There was an empty Bug exoskeleton in the lower level, jointed legs and droopy antennae and empty eye sockets. I never went down there. It was creepy.
The Bugs would end me if they found out that my office was an actual Bug ship. I had Bug tech, Bug weapons, and the US Space Ship SunStar here. But the Bugs were another problem for another time. If I lived that long.
“With just the Mammoth sold on the black market, I can pay off my bills.”
Jagger blinked several times, his eyes red and dry. “You can’t acquire or sell military scrap without proper sealsss.”
“Black market doesn’t need Gov. seals.” Mentally, I nudged him. “Think about the MS Angels attack. The Angels are our enemies.”
I pushed harder.
“We need to kill the Angels,” he said, his mouth far too relaxed, his too-bright eyes focusing on the mid-distance. His color was a bloated bright red and there was a white ring around his mouth where the circulation was altering. His fever was high and he wasn’t sweating. My funky nanobots were taking over his system. The med-bay couldn’t help him anymore, not with this.
“Ninety-second warning,” Jolene said.
“Go to sleep,” I whispered to Jagger. “Everything is over. The Angels are all dead and you can rest. Rest. Sleep . . .”
Jagger stood in a faster-than-human move and nearly got shot for his speed, Gomez’s auto-dart system aimed at his right eye. But Jagger walked with purpose to my bed and shoved the cats to the side. The big guy fell into the sheets. The cat-purring nearly overpowered the human snores.
